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Our Leadership Team
Our leadership team brings passion and experience to building partnerships, developing actionable science, and developing the future scientific workforce for agri-environmental research.
DIRECTOR
Kent Messer
Kent Messer is the S. Hallock du Pont Professor of Applied Economics at the University of Delaware. He co-founded and co-directed the Center for Behavioral and Experimental Agri-Environmental Research (CBEAR), with Paul Ferraro in 2014. Messer continues to serve as Director of CBEAR. Messer received his BA from Grinnell College, his MS from the University of Michigan, and his PhD from Cornell University. Messer’s research interests include the behavioral response to food risks and the interface between agriculture and the environment. He had published over 130 publications, served as editor of the Agricultural and Resource Economics Review, and was an Associate Editor for the American Journal of Agricultural Economics. Messer has been an investigator of interdisciplinary proposals worth over $83 million from numerous sources, including NSF, EPA, NOAA, and USDA.
DIRECTOR OF OUTREACH
Mark Masters
Mark Masters currently serves as Director of the Georgia Water Planning and Policy Center at Albany State University and is a leading expert in agricultural water use and policy in the Southeastern U.S. Throughout his career, Mark has led numerous research and outreach projects related to water resources in Georgia and has positioned the Center as a trusted technical resource for the State and its water planning efforts. Mark is active on a number of local, state and national advisory boards including the American Farm Bureau Water Advisory Committee, Governor’s Soil and Water Advisory Committee, the Institute for Georgia Environmental Leadership Board of Directors.
Co-Founder and Co-Director
Paul Ferarro
Paul J. Ferraro is the Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of Human Behavior and Public Policy at Johns Hopkins University. Ferraro’s research focuses on building a credible evidence base about the environmental and social impacts of public and private programs. Combining the approaches of epidemiologists, with their naturally occurring data, and clinical trial health scientists, with their randomized controlled trials, Ferraro seeks to identify the causal links between the actions we take to improve our world and the impacts of those actions. He also has broad interests in behavioral science and causal inference. Because these research areas are multi-disciplinary and applied, he collaborates with scientists and engineers from a variety of social, natural and physical science disciplines, as well as practitioners in the field.
